Very important posting by Rick Hasen, pulling together many links and stories debunking the “vote rigging” claims coming out of the Trump campaign. Rick deserves all the credit for assembling this valuable list of resources; I am posting here only so that there is a permanent link for reporters, advocates, and academics.

Claims of massive fraud and efforts to discredit the election system are preposterous on their face, but injurious to our democratic system. Long before Trump arrived on the scene Republicans helped manufacture an environment in which the talk show/Breitbart/Sean Hannity set actually thinks massive fraud is possible. Republicans insistent on ensuring the integrity of the election system with voter ID requirements (which are overwhelmingly popular with voters) too often made it sound as if impersonation and double voting are commonplace. They are not. For example, in Florida in 2014 the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher turned over 14 names of people who possibly voted twice. Roughly 400,000 people voted in the county that year.

As the Associated Press reported, a 2012 study found millions of out of date voter registrations or people registered in multiple states, but “the report cited no evidence that those errors had contributed to any significant voter fraud. Instead, it pointed to estimates that at least 51 million U.S. citizens are eligible but not registered to vote.” (If you’ve moved from one state to another you likely did not “unregister” in your former state of residence; that’s not fraud.) Contrary to Trump’s latest hysteria, “Most experts say voter fraud is extremely rare in the U.S., with one study by a Loyola Law School professor finding just 31 known cases of impersonation fraud out of 1 billion votes cast in U.S. elections between 2000 and 2014.”

When I was on the News Hour yesterday, Al Cardenas of the Republican Party of Florida was adamant that massive voter fraud is not a problem.

There have been responsible Republicans on this for years, and more coming on line now, like Mark Braden, John Fortier, Chris Ashby, Rob Kelner, Ohio SOS John Husted, and others.

Let’s hope after this election we see a turning point for the GOP, which can start with recognizing that voter fraud is an isolated problem not a massive one, and end with a repudiation of laws, such as very strict state voter identification laws, which make it harder to vote but do nothing to prevent fraud or instill voter confidence. Doing so is not only the right thing for Republicans to do, it is in their self-interest. Expanding and appealing to an electorate which is not old and white is the only way for GOP survival on a national scale.

Donald Trump’s “election protection” effort will be run by Mike Roman, a Republican operative best known for promoting a video of apparent voter intimidation by the New Black Panthers outside a polling place in 2008.

Roman is to oversee poll-watching efforts as Trump undertakes an unprecedented effort by a major party nominee by calling into question the legitimacy of the popular vote weeks before election day….

Roman is best known for his role in promoting a video that showed two members of the New Black Panthers – a fringe group that claims descent from the 1960s radicals – standing outside a Philadelphia polling place dressed in uniforms, with one carrying a nightstick. Police are called and the two men leave.

At a campaign rally here Monday evening, Dave Radtke, 66, said he expects Democrats will load people on buses in Chicago and bring them to Wisconsin to vote, where legal residents are allowed to register on Election Day. Josh Eilers, 22, said he expects Democrats will go to Chicago and pay homeless people to vote for Hillary Clinton, something that he says happens “way too much.” Sue Rosenthal, 74, said “something seems off” with early voting programs in large cities that she says allow a stream of people to have access to voting machines ahead of Election Day. Gene A. Wheaton, 68, said the Democrats will use “any means necessary” to win, so he worries about “the stealth thing that they can do electronically or some other way to really either erase somebody’s valid vote or get a bunch of people in secretly voting to load it up for the other side.”

Trump supporters were insistent that such fraud is rampant and that major media outlets are conspiring to hide the issue. While many said they are glad that Wisconsin now requires an identification to vote, they said polls need more security measures.

Donald Trump’s escalating effort to undermine the presidential election as “rigged” has alarmed government officials administering the vote as well as Democratic and Republican leaders, who are anxiously preparing for the possibility of unrest or even violence on Election Day and for an extended battle over the integrity of the outcome.

Hillary Clinton’s advisers are privately worried that Trump’s calls for his supporters to stand watch at polling places in cities such as Philadelphia for any hint of fraud will result in intimidation tactics that might threaten her supporters and suppress the votes of African Americans and other minorities.

The Democratic nominee’s campaign is recruiting and training hundreds of lawyers to fan out across the country, protecting people’s right to vote and documenting any signs of foul play, according to several people with knowledge of the plans.

But his rhetoric could also have the impact of hurting his own campaign, according to some of the latest research into the topic.

In one experiment conducted by Adam Seth Levine of Cornell University and Robyn L. Stiles of Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communication, different groups of voters were given differentmessages in an online ad touting voter registration — including “Registering is quick, easy, & free,” “Wealthy buying elections,” or “The system is rigged.”

Researchers found that the negative messages like “Wealthy buying elections” and “The system is rigged” were less effective in generating clicks than a more positive message like “registering is quick, easy, and free.”

This is also why in recent days we have seen the Clinton team pivoting to a message that voting is easy from one talking about Republicans trying to make it more difficult to vote.

Now, for the first time in modern history, a major-party candidate rejects both sides of that equation. If he loses, Donald Trump says, it will be due to cheating that makes the result illegitimate. If he wins, he will imprison his defeated opponent.

Many Americans may not have given much thought to what a breathtaking departure this represents, because until now we have had the luxury of never having to think about such things. We have been able to take for granted the quadrennial peaceful transition of power. We watch from a distance when political parties in one foreign country or another take up arms after losing an election. We look, as at something that could never happen here, when a foreign leader sends an opponent to jail or into exile. This can happen in Zimbabwe, we think, or Russia, or Cambodia, but not here. Not in the United States.

Instead of disavowing this absurdity outright, Republican leaders sit by in spineless silence. Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, and Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, are the two most powerful Republicans in the country and should be willing to put the national interest above their own. Both know full well that there is no “rigging,” and yet between them they have managed one tepid response to Mr. Trump’s outrageous accusations: “Our democracy relies on confidence in election results,” Mr. Ryan’s spokeswoman said, “and the speaker is fully confident the states will carry out this election with integrity.”

This is like standing back while an arsonist pours gasoline all over your house, then expressing confidence that the fire department will get there in time.

In recent days, Donald Trump has been aggressively pushing the idea that the election is about to be stolen from him through voter fraud and dirty tricks. The Republican candidate, though, has not been a paragon of clarity when it comes to how the election is being rigged against him—Monday morning he tweeted that Hillary Clinton allegedly being fed questions before a Democratic primary debate was a kind of “voter fraud!” Here’s what we know, though, about what he’s said and why his claims that the election is being stolen have no basis whatsoever in reality.

It concludes:

Finally, vote-counting at county offices and elsewhere is a transparent act, with Republicans, Democrats, and good government groups watching the counting. When voting anomalies occur, generally because of human error, they are quickly caught and publicized on Twitter, and then corrected. Most election administrators doing the tabulating and reporting are dedicated public servants who want the process to be as transparent as possible to promote public confidence—not a cadre of Clinton-backing globalists who have secretly infiltrated the most local level of Democratic participation for just this moment.As the Columbus Dispatch reported of the prospect of rigging Ohio’s elections: “ ‘It would take Mission Impossible,’ said Terry Casey, a Republican consultant in Columbus who sat on the Franklin County Board of Elections for 14 years and is a former chairman of the Ohio Board of Voting Machine Examiners.”

None of this of course will convince die-hard Trump supporters and some Republican voters who have been primed to believe Democrats are regularly stealing elections. I hope they won’t get violent or intimidate voters on Election Day, as is seeming increasingly—and frighteningly—likely. For those of us living on planet Earth, we should dismiss Trump’s claims of vote-rigging as the rantings of someone who is either too stupid to know how voting works or too disingenuous to tell the truth.

The Early Voting Information Center

We are a non-partisan academic research center based at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.

Professor Paul Gronke and his team conduct research on early voting and election reform, predominantly in the United States. In addition to our scholarly research, we have worked on projects with the Pew Center on the States, the Federal Election Assistance Commission, the Center for American Progress and a number of state and local elections offices.

The Early Voting Information Center is proud to have co-hosted the inaugural Election Sciences, Reform, and Administration Conference in July of 2017. More information can be found on the conference website.

Professor Gronke's academic credentials--including his curriculum vita, courses taught, and other research papers--can be found at his personal Reed web page.